Is anyone an audiologist here? Can you please help with a quick question?

[HappyGrace]

What does it mean if one shows moderate hearing loss in one ear (in the 40-60 db range) but 96% speech discrimination in that ear? Wouldn't the speech discrimination be less than that with that type of hearing loss? (the SRT was 45, if that helps. Also, the 40 db measurement was in the high tones, and the 60 db was in the low tones.)

 

The audiologist today was acting like this was all "over my head" and not able to be understood by me-grrr.

[jenslp]

The reason speech discrimination doesn't always seem to mesh with level or severity of hearing loss, is that different speech sounds are made at different frequencies and certain speech sounds are more important for the understanding of and discrimination of speech than others.  So one can have a mild loss in a particular range of frequency but have more difficulty with speech or vise versa. 

[zimom]

Speech discrimination testing should be performed at a comfortable listening level for the patient. (So if the SRT was 45dB generally about 85 dB would be comfortable for them.). Someone with a moderate hearing loss could have great discrimination (in the 90s), just ok (in the 70% range) or really really poor (0-30% for instance). One of the reasons speech discrimination testing is done is to see if the patient is a good candidate for amplification and to look for red flags. If someone had only a mild to moderate loss and say 20% discrimination, you would worry about the possibility of an acoustic neuroma or something along that line.

 

So in a nutshell, it can vary tremendously and it is just another test to give the audiologist the bigger picture.

 

Audiologist in a prior life

[zimom]

Thought I would add, conductive hearing losses tend to have good discrimination. So a child with hearing loss due to middle ear fluid, it does not effect their discrimination, again, as long as you can get speech loud enough for them.

 

Sensorineural hearing loss (inner ear) tends to have decreased discrimination, with the belief the more neural component (non-cochlear, actual auditory based), contributing the most to diminished speech understanding.